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Monday, June 7, 2004
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 Monday, June 7, 2004
started 6/7/2004; 5:25:03 AM - last post 6/8/2004; 2:33:55 AM
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Doc Searls - Monday, June 7, 2004 
6/7/2004; 9:25:03 AM (reads: 10997, responses: 6)
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It's the difference between pulling and pushing a string 
| | Just had that thought about what RSS does to the Web. |
| | What you do is give the user (and his or her designated aggregators, or whatevers) something to pull. Not just the writer (or syndicator) something to push, even though RSS provides that too. Think about it. |
Meanwhile, elsewhere
The killer app for RSS
| | Steve's on the eyePhone here, pointing me to this New York Times piece about how (excuse me... it just blows my mind to read this) the only way to add a new channel to the cable/satellite lineup, beyond a certain point, is through VOD, or Video On Demand. Here (Steve points out) is the money 'graph: |
| | For a new network trying to get noticed, agreeing to be shown only in an on-demand format is a leap of faith. Most viewers, unaccustomed to hunting for programs in the on-demand world, may not know the networks exist because the programs often are not publicized in TV Guide magazine or newspapers. |
| | So... How do viewers find out, if not through TV Guide or the equivalents (which suck horribly, having been buried by the Xtreme volume of the crap they list)? |
| | Easy: RSS, just like I said on Friday. |
| | Time to notify Comcast, Cox, AT&T, Adelphia, DirecTV, DishTV and Ken Belson (writer of the piece) at the New York Times. Let's tell them this: Notification is what it's about. It's what gives us The Live Web. Implement RSS and you'll blow away the 24/7 inventory listing limitations of cable and satellite TV (and the whole dumb and dated notion of "channels"), by giving Supply a way to notify Demand, and for the latter to subscribe to, and not merely to consume, the former. |
| | Here's the kicker: It'll pay for itself by giving sellers and buyers of programs a way to find each other, quickly, easily, and regularly, and to relate, in the form of money for goods. (What a novel economic concept for a business whose consumers were never really its customers.) |
| | RSS will kill, finally, what hasn't worked for TV since the Net came along. |
| | And it will finally give TV Guide a whole new model for itself. (Talk about a fun job!) |
Winner
Fire plug
| | It was nearly impossible to get reliable, current information. I had to get most the news from news.google.com, because of our lack of local news radio. The agencies we spoke with were nice, and helpful, but there's clearly an issue getting information out to the citizens. |
And why didn't they call it iPlug?
| | The first question is, why did Apple have to invent this (all due credit, etc.)? Why didn't somebody else come up with this, like, two years ago? |
| | The second question is, why didn't Apple build an FM transmitter into this thing? Why go wireless-to-wired when you could make a Wi-Fi-to-FM bridge? |
| | In other words, there's still a market hole here, folks. Somebody should go fill it, and not lock the customer into using iTunes (or any particular source). By the way, I pointed to the Belkin TuneCast II in that last link because it lets the user select any FM channel, not just the bottom four, which is the default on too many of these things. |
Say no more
| | Part of the reason to avoid conclusions like that is to avoid appearing biased, of course. The ritual called "he said, she said" is like an advertisement with that theme: both sides had their say, no bias here, trust the news you get from us. But it's slowly dawning on some in the press that it almost works the opposite way today. |
| | When journalists avoid drawing open conclusions, they are more vulnerable to charges of covert bias, of having a concealed agenda, of not being up front about their perspective, of unfairly building a case (for, against) while pretending only to report "what happened." From this angle, avoiding summary judgment doesn't necessarily build confidence in your reporting; it may encourage them to attack you for tilting the boards, for denying you have a perpsective on things, for bias... |
| | Authority in journalism is up grabs today; credentials matter less, but they still matter. Reputational capital still counts too. That's why Campaign Desk is parked at Columbia. That's why Dana Milbank went from the New Republic to the Washington Post. But having good information matters more, relative to an "established" reputation, because people will find what's good--on the Internet, they can find what's good--even if it's not in the Washington Post, even if it's the editorial product of a sophomore at Towson State. |
| | When the gates swing open, the gatekeepers may have to find other work... |
| | American journalists underwent a de-voicing when they professionalized themselves in the twentieth century. If they are now to begin re-voicing themselves, that would be a change of major consequence. Reputational capital had been necessary to play in the news game. If you can be a player with almost no capital, that too is a major change, even if, like Brian Stelter, you are a small player on whom bigger players rely. Conclusion-avoiding and offloading judgment to experts and partisans became a craft norm in political journalism-- the gods of credibility had decreed it. If there is now more credibility in coming to judgment (when you have the goods) that is a big change, as well. It means new gods are rumbling under the press room. |
| | There is a world of difference between the journalism of the mid-70s, when Watergate entered the imaginary of the press, and the predicament of the professional journalist today. Part of that predicament is how to re-ground journalism after its gravitational shift. This involves the kind of truthtelling authority you decide to seek. Every day another journalist recognizes it. Last week, it was Dan Froomis: "The Internet demands voice." Today it was Vaughn Ververs, who said his colleagues in the press have not recognized how different the world is for them, and how little they have actually changed. |
| | The press is just one part of this. I show how journalism, politics, and law are all intertwined, as our culture is gripped by an ethic of aggression by which attack is ratcheted up and overvalued, while compromise and conciliation are undervalued or even scorned. I show the roots in our educational system of our devotion to opposition, explore how other cultures manage conflict, and, of course, tackle the gender question: Agonism, or ritual opposition, plays a greater role in the social lives of boys and men than of girls and women. And our tendency to make everything into a fight reflects men's culture more then women's (which is not to say that women can't learn to do it as well as men). |
Burning questions
| | This is pretty creepy. We heard the big helicopters whup overhead Saturday night, and I saw the smoke out over the Channel Islands, but there was nothing on the radio, so I didn't learn anything more about it until somebody mentioned the fire at church, and we noticed about a mile of oil tanker railroad cars parked beside Highway 101, which was closed a few miles to the west. (In fact, a railroad trestle had already reportedly burned down, and probably won't be rebuilt for a while, which is bad news.) |
| | It's still a bummer that we no longer have a local news station. There's just our ABC-TV affiliate, which doesn't have much to say during those times when other things are paying the bills. |
Pistons beat Cylinders
| | Do I ever write here about sports? Hey, better now than never. |
| | So okay. I gotta say this about the Pistons: they're a helluva team. And Larry Brown is a helluva coach. The game came down to defense. The Lakers played good defense. Kobe did an amazing job on Rip Hamilton. Kobe stole balls, blocked shots, and all but shut the Ripper down. Still, all the Pistons, including the bench, played Xtreme defense, nearly to perfection. (Excecpt on Shaq, who's about as easy to stop as a volcano.) At the end the Lakers seemed wasted, even demoralized. That's great defense at work. |
| | The Lakers have more horespower, but I think the Pistons have the better all-wheel drive. |
| | But... I still think the Wet Ones will take the series in six games. Especially if they fire on more than two cylinders. |
The revolution will not be choked
| | The future playback of recorded music will not be tied to physical media (e.g., compact discs) or singular virtual players (e.g., iPods), but to many objects with shapes and sizes designed to appeal to our tactile relationships with music and, at the same time, to have the features of a virtual music device. I imagine these being called Playbacks (not really, but just to give them a name)... |
| | Playbacks will have three important sets of features: 1) physical style and symbolism. 2) wireless receive and transmit. 3) virtual music libraries and playlists. |
| | Interesting to reconcile this with Marc's idea that "the money is always at the aggregation point" (rather, presumably, than in manufacture, distribution, or control of choke points along the ways between first sources and final customers). |
A moving idea for a conference
| | Russell Beattie pulls no punches in Where's the Mobility? He smites a series of conferences (at least two of which I'm attending, as a panelist), and then offers a conf of his own. Some excerpts: |
| | Anyone who doesn't realize by now that the Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by mobile devices must be living on, well, here in the U.S. Not that Yahoo and Google aren't going to play a role, but there are going to be *billions* of mobile devices on the web very soon now and that's going to change things fundamentally. The Web 2.0 is going to be dominated by XHTML-MP - why isn't this the number one topic of a conference like this?... |
| | Does Silicon Valley have blinders on? Did they get a technology-lobotomy? These entire conferences could be filled with *nothing* but analysis of mobile tech - their impact, their influence, the opportunities and more. What are these organizers doing? Do they not read? Do they not travel outside of the country ever? |
| | This reminds me of my brief encounter with Ann Winblad and Walt Mossberg at the DEMO conference in June. Somehow I ended up in a little chat-circle with them at the cocktail party the evening before the conference. The topic switched to blogging (and how the conference seemed to have a bit too much of it) and Walt just shook his head. It's just another form of Journalism, he said, period. My jaw dropped and I tried to explain what will happen when a billion mobile devices come online and how converged multimedia devices and location affect publishing from the mobile user, but he didn't want anything to do with it. He had his definition of what a blog was and that was it, done. End of conversation. Ann seemed opened to the idea of weblogs as an evolving platform, but also seemed convinced by Walt's determination and obvious domination of the concept. |
| | Yeah, well, Walt's a fucking idiot. (I've been waiting a while to say that). As must be these guys who are running these conferences. They're the same sorts of people - claiming to have a bead on what's happening, but really, a step or two behind what's going on. I hadn't realized how much of a clue someone like Chris Shipley has until now. |
| | Anyways, this brings me to my final thought: Let's do this ourselves. Are you in the Bay Area? Are you working on the next generation mobile services and devices? Let's get together. Let's have a meeting of some sort and talk about the topics that are supposed to be on these conference agendas. |
| | I'm embarassed to say how little I know about The Whole Mobile Thing. And this is one more time I wish I was still hanging out full-time in the Bay Area. Hey, but even though I don't, I'll be glad to come to RussellConf. |
| | By the way, read down through the comments. Some excellent ones there. |
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We still have local stations here in Yuma AZ. One does a great job of reporting local news, and often has little details they didn't have in the paper or TV. Guess we don't recognize how lucky we are!
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Doc Searls - Re: local radio
6/7/2004; 10:03:23 PM (reads: 762, responses: 0)
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Lucky you are. We don't even have a local NPR station radio or PBS station on TV. Kinda pathetic.
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Ryan Scott - Pictures of the Gaviota Fire
6/7/2004; 10:22:49 PM (reads: 1006, responses: 0)
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I flew by the fire yesterday and took some pictures:
http://www.myphotofriends.com/ryanscott/gaviotafire
We live at El Capitan ranch exit, back in an avocado orchard. My wife went out Saturday to run some errands, and on return the police wouldn't let her back north past Bacara. Our dogs were in the house, but they wouldn't let her back, despite the fact that there was no evacuation order. And the fire was 10 miles from our house. She couldn't prove she lived there because our driver's licenses have our LA address. We live in two places. It doesn't seem reasonable that she should have to carry property documents with her in the car.
Speaking to police and calling both the US Fire Service and the Santa Barbara Sheriffs dept, she got conflicting information - one said the fire was travelling East, towards us, and the other said North West, away from us.
Once my wife got our accountant to fax her documents proving we owned the ranch, she was able to go home, and had to start packing everything we thought we would have trouble replacing if the house burned down.
It was nearly impossible to get reliable, current information. I had to get most the news from news.google.com, because of our lack of local news radio. The agencies we spoke with were nice, and helpful, but there's clearly an issue getting information out to the citizens.
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Scott Reynen - Tannen
6/8/2004; 2:47:16 AM (reads: 696, responses: 1)
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"(which is not to say that women can't learn to do it as well as men)."
the irony is that tannen has made a living describing what seperates us while almost completely ignoring what draws us together. her work on gender is basically "men are from mars, women are from venus" with a slightly larger vocabulary, allowing it to pass as "academic." if women can adopt "men's culture," what exactly makes it "men's" culture? after reading a few of tannen's books, this is a question i've never seen her answer, yet the concept of gendered culture is the basis of almost everything she writes.
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Tracy Hall - Re: Why didn't somebody else come up with this, like, two ye
6/8/2004; 6:33:55 AM (reads: 725, responses: 0)
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They did. The commercial version is called "AudioRamp iRAD"; there are also, I believe, both Homeplug and 802.11a/b versions. As usual, Apple's innovation is not concept, but a cleaner, more complete system (iTunes as the basis) and strong marketing.
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Doc Searls - Re: Tannen
6/8/2004; 7:40:16 AM (reads: 829, responses: 0)
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True. The Argument Culture was a brief break from her Gender Stuff. But that's her beat, and I don't have a problem with it. I would have liked to have seen more dialog around the whole Argument Thing, but alas
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